Estonian to Inuktitut in Latin script: preserve whose belongings are involved
Oma can connect an owner with the person acting
The Estonian explanatory dictionary describes possessive oma as referring back to the subject of the same clause. Its example Ta peseb oma pead concerns washing the actor’s own head. Another example, Ta külastas oma sugulasi, describes visiting that person’s own relatives. In an Inuktitut translation, replacing this relationship with an unspecified third-person owner can make the head or relatives belong to somebody else. The source contains a relationship between participants, not simply an extra emphasis word.
The same dictionary records other uses of oma: it can stand for something belonging to a person without repeating the noun, describe something familiar or one’s own, or emphasize an approximate quantity. These uses cannot all be analyzed as the same reflexive possessive. An Estonian phrase in which oma accompanies a quantity does not automatically add an owner to the Inuktitut noun. Establish whether the source identifies possession, substitutes for a previously mentioned thing, or modifies the interpretation of an amount before selecting target morphology.
The owner can be the subject or somebody else
Louis-Jacques Dorais’s description of Nunavik Inuktitut contrasts igluni takujanga with iglunga takujanga. The former describes seeing one’s own house; in the latter, the house belongs to somebody else. He explains the reflexive possessive category traditionally called fourth person through the connection between the possessor and the clause’s subject. The label does not introduce a fourth individual into the story.
This provides a useful contrast for an Estonian narrative with two people and their belongings. Determine whose house is mentioned and whether that owner is also the person seeing it. If the narrative changes actors in the next clause, continuing the same possessive relationship may require a different interpretation. Dorais separately tracks the number of possessors and the number of possessed things: two owners can share one house, while one owner can possess several. The target ending can encode distinctions that Estonian distributes over a pronoun, noun and surrounding context. His attested house examples are Nunavik forms, not a spelling prescription for every Inuktitut dialect.
Reflexive pronouns and possessive endings are related but distinct
Richard Compton’s analysis examines Inuktut pronouns and their internal person, number and case structure. He identifies a separate oblique reflexive pronoun whose distribution differs across varieties: in Inuinnaqtun it is restricted to third person, while some Inuktitut dialects also allow it with first or second person. This is another reason not to assume that an Estonian reflexive-related expression always corresponds to one invariant Inuktitut word.
Compton also shows connections between oblique pronoun endings and possessor marking on nouns, while explicitly noting that the two sets are not always identical. For Estonian-to-Inuktitut translation in Latin script, a possessive relationship may therefore appear on the noun instead of as a standalone equivalent of oma. The absence of a separate word is not evidence that ownership has disappeared. Conversely, adding a separate reflexive pronoun cannot automatically repair a wrong possessive ending. Interpret whether the construction names the owner of a thing or refers to a participant in another grammatical relationship, then keep the actor–owner connection that the Estonian clause actually establishes.
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